Re: btusb "firmware request while host is not available" at resume

From: Gabriel C
Date: Mon Sep 11 2017 - 20:14:09 EST


On 11.09.2017 22:06, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 12:29:55PM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 07:11:38PM +0200, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:
On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 06:46:47AM -0700, Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote:
To confirm, reverting this fixes the problem I was seeing in 4.13. I've
queued it up for the next 4.13-stable release as well.

Commit 81f95076281f ("firmware: add sanity check on shutdown/suspend") may
seem kludgy but the reason for it was to cleanup the horrible forced and
required UMH lock even when the UMH lock was *not* even needed, which was later
removed via commit 06a45a93e7d34aa ("firmware: move umh try locks into the umh
code").

So what does this mean now that it is reverted?

We discuss what we should do about upkeeping a warning in the future, as
I think technically the warning was still valid and it could help avoid
racy lookups with the filesystem which otherwise could have gone unnoticed.

Removing the old UMH lock even when the UMH lock was *not* needed was the right
thing to do but commit 81f95076281f (("firmware: add sanity check on
shutdown/suspend") was put in place as a safe guard as the lock was also
placing an implicit sanity check on the API. It ensures the API with the cache
was used as designed, otherwise you do run the risk of *not getting the
firmware you may need* -- Marcel seems to acknowledge this possibility.

It may be possible for us to already have in place safeguards so that upon
resume we are ensuring the path to the firmware *is* available, so IMHO we
should remove this *iff* we can provide this guarantee. Otherwise the check is
valid. You see, although the UMH lock was bogus, it did implicitly ask the
question: is it safe for *any* helper to run and make assumptions on the
filesystem then?

In lieu of this question being answered the warning is valid given the design
of the firmware API and the having the cache available as a measure to resolve
this race.

I don't understand what you are trying to say here at all.

To be specific, what, if anything, is a problem with the current state
of Linus's tree (and the next 4.13-stable release)?

The warning is issued when drivers issue *new* firmware requests on resume. The
firmware API cache was designed to enable drivers to easily be able to request
firmware on resume without concern about races against the filesystem, but in order
for this to work the drivers must have requested the firmware prior to suspend.

If something needs to be fixed, can you make a patch showing that? Or
do we also need to revert anything else as well to get back to a "better
working" state?

I took a look at the driver and it seems that btusb_setup_intel_new() is
not called after the driver is initialized, rather its called only when
hci_dev_do_open() is called. Its not clear to me how you can end up calling
this on resume but not prior to this on a running system. Feedback from
someone more familiar with bt would be useful.

While I really don't know that code I can tell anything about .. however this is _NOT_
about Intel Hardware only .. I trigger that on laptops with Atheros..

So seems like some driver need be fixed before trying something like this again?

Regards,

Gabriel C